Demi Mondaine: Volume One Read online

  DEMI

  MONDAINE

  Volume I

  N. R. Mayfield

  Copyright © 2021 by N. R. Mayfield

  All rights reserved.

  The characters and events portrayed herein are entirely fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronical, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design by Yocla Book Cover Designs

  Contents

  Demi Mondaine Volume I

  The Demimondaine

  The Veil

  Grounded

  The Ghoul

  Umm Ghulah

  Cross-Country

  Spellbound

  Devil’s Forge

  Devil Take the Hindmost

  Minokawa

  Wayward

  One

  Two

  Three

  Devil’s Trap

  The Demimondaine

  California, March 2014

  Demi stood atop a wooden watchtower twenty feet above a barren patch of desert. A cool night wind sent shivers across her back, and stars twinkled far above. She raised her infrared binoculars to her eyes and stared down at the stretch of chain-link fence she and her unit were tasked with protecting. All she could see were shrubs scattered here and there amid the sand—shrubs no different than the ones scattered around her side of the border.

  Yuma, Arizona was only a few miles to the east, and I-8 ran just north of here, but for all intents and purposes, they were in the middle of nowhere. Demi and her unit were just one of many that had been activated by Governor Sinquefield in response to the federal government’s increasingly bold demands for heightened border security.

  A young man stood beside her in the watchtower. “You should have worn a thicker jacket,” he said. Pete Davies was nineteen, eight years her junior, thinly-built with a wiry golden beard across his chin and wide, thoughtful eyes. “You’re shivering.”

  “Who’s cold?” Demi lied. ““I’m not cold. You’re cold.”

  “See anything from that oversized deer-stand of yours?” a voice hissed over her radio. Demi rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah, Doug,” Demi replied. “Your girlfriend. I think she’s making a run for it. Should I shoot her?”

  “Nah,” Doug said. “You win some, you lose some.”

  “You tend to just lose,” Demi said, putting her binoculars down.

  “Ouch, Demi,” Pete said. “Take it easy on poor Dougie.”

  “Hey,” Demi said defensively. “If he wants easy, he shouldn’t be letting his girlfriend hop across the border, because I’m pretty sure we’ve all hit that, am I right?”

  “Look alive, people,” Sergeant Casey said over the radio. “We’ve got vehicles incoming.”

  “Crap.” Demi pulled her binoculars back up, only to find they were no longer necessary. Three heavy military transport vehicles had pulled up on the Mexican side of the fence, halogen headlights illuminating the night. An array of smaller jeeps and trucks surrounded the heavy transports, and several soldiers appeared on foot, rifles slung across their backs.

  “What the hell is this?” she asked.

  “I… I don’t know,” Pete said. “Whatever it is looks pretty heavy.”

  “Open the gates,” Sergeant Casey ordered.

  “Open the gates?” Demi whispered to Pete. “What’s going on?” Two men from their unit rushed to pull a large section of fence. Sergeant Casey strode out into the open, and three of the Mexican soldiers crossed the border on foot. Casey and the green-clad soldiers met atop a sand dune and huddled together.

  “This is shady as hell,” Demi said. Casey waved for the heavy transports to come rolling through the barrier. The men on the ground made no move to search the crossing vehicles.

  “You think those guys are with the White Dagger?” Pete whispered.

  “Oh, come on, kid,” Demi said. “You’ve been watching too much fake news. White Dagger is just a bunch of conspiracy theory crap the Republicans spew to make people like you scared of Mexicans. You really think there’s some super-cartel out there running all the crime in the world?”

  “What about El Cucaracha?” Pete asked. He was referring to Juan Hernandez, a one-time mayor of Mexico City and now the world’s most notorious fugitive. “Why’s he all over the news every night?”

  “He was just a politician,” Demi said. “He brought the cartels together for a minute, but his time’s up. Watch the real news for God’s sake—no one talks about White Dagger with a straight face. El Cucaracha and his corrupt buddies in Mexico City sold the keys to the kingdom, but Novena Videla put them all in their place after she became president.”

  “If you say so,” Pete said doubtfully. “This still looks pretty cartel to me.”

  “You’re right about that,” Demi said. Two of the Mexican soldiers retreated back to their side of the border. The American soldiers at the fence hurriedly closed the gate, and the escort vehicles on the other side retreated back into the desert. The heavy transports that had already crossed over to the American side rumbled forward through the sand, their massive engines growling as they drove north towards the interstate. The remaining Mexican soldier hopped into the last of the diesel-fueled behemoths, but Demi got a good look at his face through her binoculars. He looked early twenties, his hair cropped short, his face narrow with high features.

  “Hey, sarge,” Demi said over the radio. “What the hell was that about?”

  “Above your paygrade,” Casey snapped back. “Ours is not to reason why, private, ours is but to do and die. When spooky things happen, you leave it to the spooks.”

  “Roger that,” Demi said, pulling her binoculars to her eyes. But instead of facing the border, she turned northwards, watching three sets of taillights fade into the night. She might have put the strange event out of mind entirely if the armored transports hadn’t rolled back through barely an hour later, passing back across to the Mexican border with little more than a nod from Casey. This time, she knew better than to raise her concerns with the sergeant.

  ***

  “I’m telling you, I’ve seen it!” Doug shouted, his lean, elongated face red as he wobbled on his barstool. Demi finished off her beer and waved for the bartender to bring another round of shots. She, Doug, and four more soldiers from her patrol unit sat around a circular high-top table, a platter of nachos and two buckets of wings between them.

  “You have not,” said Dave, a square-jawed kid from Palmetto. “Who do you think you’re fooling?”

  “I’m serious, man,” Doug said, shoveling a handful of overloaded nachos in his mouth while he spoke. Viscous yellow sauce dripped down his chin and dotted the table beneath him, so processed it could barely be called cheese anymore. And yet, was there any other food-like substance that tasted so good? Not on this side of the border, that much she was sure. “It’s the scariest thing that ever happened to me.”

  “Go on and tell us,” Demi said, leaning back in her chair. Her head swam with the copious quantities of liquor she’d consumed since her shift ended. Her chest had felt tight ever since she’d watched that strange convoy pass through the border unmolested earlier that night. It had been just after midnight when the transports returned to Mexico—any later, and they would have hit the shift change or been met by a different unit altogether. Sergeant Casey had passed it off as some black ops thing that they shouldn’t ask questions about, and it was certainly possible. But something st
ill felt wrong.

  “Don’t encourage him, Demi,” said the only other woman in their group, a stocky brunette named Claire. “He’s told this story a hundred times.”

  “I’ve never heard it,” Demi said. She was new to the unit, fresh back from a tour overseas. A border assignment had sounded easy at the time, until she’d begun to hear stories of violent firefights and midnight sorties with the cartels. Some stretches of the border were more of a warzone than Khost.

  But in the three weeks she’d been assigned to this unit, their two-mile zone had been quiet and uneventful—until tonight. The booze wasn’t shaking the iron grip of the past that had affixed itself to her heart, pressing down on her shoulders like the proverbial monkey on her back. But where alcohol had failed her, maybe Doug’s ghost stories would do the trick.

  “Okay, so the night started like any other,” Doug said, gulping at his beer before he began. “I was here—”

  “Getting trashed,” Claire said, rolling her eyes.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Doug said, nodding in agreement. “My girl had just dumped me for the third time, so I was seeking a little liquid comfort to help drown my sorrows. I was half in the bag when these two fine senoritas rolled in with these tight little belly shirts and daisy-dukes. Next thing you know, me and the girls are in the bed of their pickup in the middle of nowhere, only—”

  “They weren’t as fine as you thought,” Dave said, shaking his head disapprovingly.

  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Doug said. “But in this case one of them had a thicker beard than me, and I told her so. Apparently, they didn’t take it as a compliment, especially after I… uh, regurgitated my dinner while I had my head down between… well, you get it. I blacked out, and when I came to, I was walking in the middle of the desert! Pitch black, nothing but the stars in the sky. I’m freezing, because all I have on is a t-shirt and jeans, and even those were covered in puke.”

  “I can believe this story,” Demi said. “It sounds plausible to me. Except the part where you convinced two girls to leave a bar with you. That’s made up for sure.”

  “Oh, come on,” Dave groaned. “This whole thing is a crock of—”

  “Hey!” Doug protested. “I was just getting to the good part. All that stuff was just backstory. I’m out here in the desert, alone. I look for my phone, but it’s dead. I sit down for a minute to try to get my bearings, but that’s no good either. So I just pick a direction and run with it.”

  “Oh my God,” Claire groaned, tugging at Demi’s arm. “Come on, let’s ditch these losers.”

  “Hold on,” Demi said, brushing Claire away before reaching for one of the tall shot glasses that sat unclaimed on the table. “I want to hear this.”

  “I’m walking, and it’s freezing,” Doug continued. “The wind is blowing like crazy, and I start to hear this sound—sort of a low moan. I figure it’s the wind, but the cold sobered me up pretty fast, and I feel this tingle on the back of my neck. I turn around, and there’s this shadow in the dark. At first, I barely noticed it, but as I kept going, I realized it was always there, hanging just out of sight. Sometimes I’d get this uneasiness, like something was coming up behind me. But I’d turn, and there’d be nothing there. I just had this feeling… you know? That something was following me and slipping back into the darkness just before I could catch it in the act.”

  Doug’s eyes grew distant, and he rested his hands on the table. Demi noticed they were trembling almost imperceptibly, and she no longer felt like this was just a story. She’d seen other soldiers come back from the war with the same look in their eyes, the fear of some terrible moment that they could never shake loose coming back to haunt them. No matter how far they ran, they could never outrun that fear.

  She closed her eyes and three images shot across her vision in rapid bursts—a screaming girl in tribal garb, her commanding officer in full combat gear shouting for her to get back, a plume of fire and sand rising twenty feet high as the air above her took flame. Her throat tightened and her mouth went dry.

  “You okay?” Claire asked, shaking Demi by the shoulder.

  “Uh, yeah!” Demi said, lurching back into the present. She tried to ignore the sheen of cold sweat that had suddenly formed over her neck and forehead. “Did you figure out what it was?”

  “It took a long time,” Doug said finally. “But eventually I convinced myself that it was all in my head—there was nothing behind me. I just said that over and over again until I thought I believed it. Then I forced myself to turn around and march straight back the way I came. I was shouting every cuss word in the book, daring whatever sorry son of a bitch was out there to come get a piece of me. That’s when I saw it—”

  “What?” Demi asked, leaning forward in her seat. “What was it?”

  “A chupacabra,” Doug said, his voice low. The rest of the unit let out a chorus of groans and laughs, and Demi sat back in her chair, a dazed look on her face. Doug’s story had felt so real—not just his words, but the look on his face when he spoke them. The beginning had been a lot of fluff, that was obvious, but when he spoke of wandering the desert, an unseen shadow dogging his every step, she’d believed him. She was angry at herself for falling victim to what had ultimately been nothing more than a stupid joke.

  “Last call,” the bartender shouted.

  “That’s my cue,” Claire said. She took her last shot and rose on shaky legs. The rest of the unit stood up too, except Doug and Demi.

  “See you tomorrow, losers,” Demi said, blowing Claire a kiss before she and the others stumbled out of the bar.

  “It’s true,” Doug said, and Demi eyed the four untouched shots sitting on the table. “I really saw a—”

  “Take a hike, prick,” Demi said, scowling at him. She almost wasn’t sure why she was as upset about his story as she was. She’d heard plenty of whoppers in her life, but this one had made her feel something, and those feelings had brought the flashbacks again. When she finally dared to crawl back into bed, the nightmares would follow.

  Not tonight though, she vowed after Doug left her alone with the rest of the booze. She downed all four glasses in a matter of seconds. Tonight, she would get blackout drunk, and when she woke she’d have nothing but fleeting regrets. Once those faded, she’d be back to her old self again, good as new, just like all the other times those memories had bubbled back to the surface unbidden.

  She stumbled over to the bar and tapped the hardwood countertop with two fingers. The bartender slid her a double serving of cheap whiskey. Demi reached for her purse to find her wallet, but a man dropped a $20.00 bill on the bar in front of her.

  “Thanks, handsome,” Demi said, the world spinning as she turned to face her benefactor. His features were blurry, but she squinted, and after a moment they came into focus for just a brief second, and she realized she’d seen him before—he was the Mexican soldier she’d watched cross the border and hop onto the transport.

  Demi smiled, and that fact slipped right out of her consciousness, driven away by a heat between her legs and the whiskey down her throat. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, setting her empty glass on the bar. She slid her arms around the man and pulled herself against him, and her lips melted into his.

  ***

  Demi woke in a panic in a strange place. A rush of adrenaline shot though her, and she struggled to remember where she was and how she had ended up here. She probably should have been panicking, but she was used to this sort of thing. Her eyes scanned her surroundings. The particle board furniture and antiquated tube television told her she was in a cheap room at the Nation’s End Motel—it was far from her first night waking up here, even though she’d only been stationed on the border for a few weeks. Every few nights the memories came back, and her efforts at suppressing them usually led her to strange beds like this.

  A man snored beside her. He was Latino, his hair shaved close to his scalp. Her breath caught in her throat when she realized who he was
, but she remained still. She drew the covers over her face, willing herself to believe this was all a dream—was she really dumb enough to hook up with a guy who could have easily been cartel for all she knew? The transports had gone back to Mexico, so why was he even still here? But finally, she decided there was no use pretending—this was the man she had seen, and this was the perfect opportunity to get the answers she needed. Something about last night was wrong, she could feel it.

  She slid out of bed, gently, so as not to disturb the man lying next to her. She was completely naked, but she couldn’t say she was surprised, not with the taste of him still on her tongue. She found her bra on the floor, and as she fastened it her eyes locked onto a wallet lying open on the dresser. She snatched it up and found a military ID for Eduardo Filipe Zepeda Sanz, age twenty-nine, two years older than her. He was a member of the Mexican Army, a soldier like herself. The real question was whether he was a stand-up guy or another corrupt hired gun for the cartels. A set of car keys sat next to the wallet, and Demi grabbed them.

  Demi found the rest of her clothes and dressed hastily while Eduardo continued to sleep peacefully in his bed. Demi tried to remember anything she could about the night before, but all she could summon were flashes of her and Eduardo in bed. They were fractured images, and told her nothing aside from that she’d had a great night.

  Eduardo’s keys in hand, she slowly turned the doorknob, timing her movements to the man’s snores. She opened the door quickly and closed it gingerly behind her. The morning light blinded her, and her stomach growled in hunger. It was good she was off duty today.

  She hurried down a flight of stairs to the parking lot, which was nearly empty except for two vehicles. One was a 1996 Buick Roadmaster with the paint peeling off its roof—she knew it belonged to the manager from her prior visits. The other was a tractor-trailer parked vertically across nine spots. She looked down at the keys in her hand. Did they belong to the semi? There weren’t any other options.